Review

"Remember Me", Acrylic on Porcelain.

Kelley Seda
All Bottled Up

Noon-8 p.m.

Mercy Seat Gallery
210 E. 16th St.
Kansas City, MO
816.421.4833

Hours: Noon-8 p.m. daily
Runs through: Nov.5

Artist's site: http://kseda.blogspot.com
Gallery site: http://www.mercyseattattoo.com

Kelley Seda recently posed a rhetorical question on her website: "Who needs sleep!?"

Seda must not, given her prolific creative output.

She's an artist for Hallmark Cards, a designer for apparel company Gama-Go, creator of the Rare Creature graphic novel series ... and still somehow found time to create the illustrations and painted ceramic bottles in her show All Bottled Up, now on display at the Mercy Seat Gallery. (Yes, the art gallery in the tattoo parlor. It's an odd combination, perhaps, but it works.)

Seda's work here is darkly charming, eliciting both smiles and shivers. Just check out the cute but just-ever-so-slightly-creepy skull in Remember Me, today's featured piece.

I fancy myself an avid drawer and illustrator of all things sweet and sour, she writes, passing the time painting in a fury in my decrepit but loverly 1910 home.

Her work, Seda adds, deals with what can be placed metaphorically or literally into a vessel over time, literature, folklore, etc., and what its contents reveal.

But it also raises issues of the things we choose to hold on to ... what Jim Croce would have called Time in a Bottle, perhaps. Seda writes that her work deals with

That might take the form of physical mementos of departed loved ones  -- what we need to hold on to physically to remember someone who has passed, Seda writes. But our "bottles" can also hold stores of anger and resentment, fermenting over time until it explodes. It's no coincidence that a companion piece to Remember Me is titled Release Me. Some things and people should be held on to, and some shouldn't. The choice belongs to each of us.

Seda's offbeat but ultimately winsome style doesn't sugarcoat her message. The flavor really is sweet and sour ... which is far more interesting on the visual palate. Uncork Bottled Up, while it's on display this month at the Mercy Seat, and taste for yourself.

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